Betrayed

This was the largest of three watercolours shown at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1887. It was very well received, particularly in the Magazine of Art where M.H. Spielman described it at length, 'Mr. Walter Langley has certainly reached a high degree of excellence, and he has succeeded just where success was most difficult. In point of fact, no theme has been more be-plastered with paint, or torn to shreds by leading ladies, than the pitiful one of the en-trapped and cast off girl, deserted to bear alone the burden of her mis-doing. The subject is one that needs the utmost care and delicacy of treatment to avoid mawkishness on the one hand or repulsiveness on the other. A middle course is necessary to bring about a poetical result, and this is precisely what Mr. Langley has succeeded in doing. The achievement is a picture at once touching and true, tender and, morally speaking, duly forbidding ... he may be considered, in some respects at least, the Jozef Israels of Birmingham' (see R. Langley, Pioneer of the Newlyn Art Colony, Bristol, 1997, p.79-80).